Responsible Party

For Caitlin Heidemann, senior year is about spirit days, AP
classes, and voting on teachers' salaries.

Caitlin Heidemann is lying on her stomach on the floor of Deborah
Henderson's second-period honors comparative religion class at Old Mill
High School in Millersville, Maryland. She props herself up on her
elbows and swings her shoeless feet in the air, creating a blur of
color with her socks, which are red at the toes and heels and striped
in bright hues in between.

Wielding a fat piece of blue sidewalk chalk, the 17-year-old is
serving as scribe for a small group creating a poster that depicts key
elements of a liberal sect of Buddhism called Mahayana. The air is
cooler on the floor where Caitlin lies, and that's a good thing. It's
November, but the school was unseasonably muggy even before the first
bell rang at 7:17 this morning. Now it's about 80 degrees in the
religion classroom, and there's no air conditioning. Their project
completed, Caitlin's group loses focus. "I'm sweating like a pig over
here," complains one boy. "I'm going to wear a Speedo to school
tomorrow."

Toward the end of the 85-minute period, the voice of Arlen Liverman,
principal of the 2,500-student school, filters through the public
announcement system. He explains that the air conditioning was turned
off before this unanticipated heat wave and can't be brought back on. A
collective groan rises from the class. The teachers have already
switched off their computers to help keep temperatures down, and they
aren't any happier about the heat than the students are. "I'm asking
you to do your very best to make it through the next couple of hours,"
Liverman says calmly.

No one talks to Caitlin about fixing the air conditioning situation,
although, as odd as it sounds, she's probably in a position to do
something about it. As the student representative on the Anne Arundel
County Board of Education, a post created by the Maryland General
Assembly in 1975 to ensure that a student perspective factors into
decisions, Caitlin has one-eighth of the say over every issue that
comes before the board—from construction contracts and physical
education requirements to teachers' salaries.

"The students don't really understand what I do," Caitlin explains
later. "Some of them don't even know they have a student board member."
Caitlin seems to relish attention, but her peers' ambivalence is a
blessing when it means that they don't lobby her at school. Besides,
the school board has bigger fish to fry than Old Mill's cooling lapse.
Nearby Arundel High School doesn't have air conditioning at all, and a
few weeks from now Caitlin will talk about today's discomfort in
support of a $20,000 plan to install a system there.

While hundreds of students sit on school boards in the United
States, and a handful can vote on certain issues, "as far as we know,
[Caitlin] is the only student board member in the country who has full
voting rights," says Paul Rudolph, president of the Anne Arundel board.
When she attended a conference for Maryland school boards this past
fall, other student board members told her they envied her power.

The county's superintendent, Eric Smith, says at first he was
skeptical about whether students were mature enough to have full voting
rights, but he's come around. "It brings a healthy dose of reality to
the decisions we're making," he says. And Rudolph believes his county's
formula works: "There's no lip service paid to someone who has full
voting rights."

Before Caitlin meets a new person, she sometimes warns that she
looks much older than her age. In truth, 17 seems just right for the
supercharged teen, with her streaky yellow-and-copper hair and
bubbling-over laugh. There's even something youthful about her serious
side, when she feels most grown-up. Perhaps it's the fact that her
optimism hasn't faded from encountering too many insurmountable
obstacles.

As a school board
representative with full voting rights, Caitlin has a say in all
of her Maryland district's matters.
—Photograph by David Kidd

In 6th grade, Caitlin ran for student council and won. But the position
was just one more thing to be involved in. "I never said, 'Oh, this is
what I want to do with my life,'" she notes. It wasn't until 11th grade
that she started attending state and regional student council
gatherings. In the meantime, she honed her leadership skills through
sports—swimming, soccer, field hockey, and lacrosse.

While she didn't concentrate on school policymaking until recently,
she's long been an organizer at home. Caitlin's the youngest in her
family, but "she's always wanted to be the oldest, she's always been
struggling to catch up," says her mother, Sheila Arrildt, an
administrator for Continental Airlines. "Caitlin runs things; that's
just her nature."

To win her position on the Anne Arundel board, Caitlin had to
convince the Chesapeake Regional Association of Student Councils, a
group of student government representatives, to elect her. The final
stage of her campaign—following a lengthy nomination process that
included essays, letters of recommendation, application forms, and an
interview—was held on her home turf. Caitlin shook hands, gave
out candy, and passed out tropical leis, using the slogan "Lay the
responsibility on Caitlin." The three candidates gave speeches about
their education priorities and answered questions. Caitlin stressed
increased academic rigor.

Rudolph says it takes school board members at least 20 hours per
week to complete their duties, which include preparing for and
participating in twice-monthly public meetings, frequent workshops to
study specific issues, student expulsion appeals, and two weeklong,
out-of- town conferences. In order to make time for her
responsibilities, Caitlin opted to take only half the regular load of
classes this year—an option available to seniors who have enough
credits to graduate—so she's free to leave school at 10:20 a.m.
instead of 1:55 p.m. Still, she says, "sometimes I'm so exhausted from
all of the work it takes for the board—all the reading, all the
meetings— that Friday night rolls around, and my girls are like,
'Caitlin, let's go out.' And I'm like, 'Girls, I've got to sleep.' And
they're like, 'We're getting coffee. Wake up.'"

Just yesterday, she spent nine hours in Annapolis sitting behind a
long, curved dais before a crowd of about 60 at the board of
education's daylong monthly meeting. She'd traded in the usual high
school uniform of tank top and low-slung jeans for a blue button-down
shirt with diagonal white pinstripes and black pants.

"I like to see goals aimed at accelerating academic achievement,"
she declared in response to a presentation by Robert Leib, the
district's director of business and government services, in support of
waiving fees for AP tests so more students can take them. Caitlin read
from the slim black laptop in front of her, using notes she had spent
about five hours preparing the week before the meeting. "The increased
diversity in my AP classes this year is a wonderful thing."

Earlier this fall, Caitlin had asked her English teacher, Sean
Swanson, for his input on waiving advanced placement fees. "I indicated
that I had a student once that had written 'I am stupid' in German on
every page of his AP booklet, and it cost his parents $75 or $80,"
Swanson recalls. Caitlin brought the booklet to the board meeting and
suggested that the district reimburse only students who score well.

Life as a student board member feels a bit schizophrenic to Caitlin.
"I live a17-year-old life, and I live an adult life," she says.
"Sometimes we'll be sitting in an executive session of the board, and
we'll be talking about personnel matters, and I'll be like, 'Oh, my
gosh, I feel like I am 57 years old!' I'm talking about this crazy
stuff that no 17- year-old should know."

The board provides her with a laptop, a phone line, a fax machine, a
voice mail box, and a reserved parking space in front of the board of
education building. Couriers bring confidential packages to her
house— usually containing personnel documents or information the
superintendent hasn't yet released to the public—that she can't
even show her mother.

Caitlin works hard at
being a normal 17-year old. "I can't get lost in the adult
world," she says.
—Photograph by David Kidd

At other times, being on the board makes her feel young. "When we all
go to social events, they drink alcoholic beverages and I'm like, 'Can
I have a Shirley Temple, please?'" Caitlin says, though she adds that
they treat her as a peer. "When I talk, it's silence."

Her two lives sometimes create conflicts. During spirit week in late
October, Caitlin stayed up until 4 a.m. with friends making togas, then
slept through a meeting with the superintendent and some board members.
"I felt absolutely awful," she says. "But I can't get lost in the adult
world, because if I do, I'll go crazy."

As a student, it's particularly difficult making decisions involving
the working conditions of her teachers. In 2002, before Caitlin served
on the board, the members promised employees a 3 percent cost-of-living
adjustment and incremental pay increases as part of its $643.8 million
budget, a$40.5 million increase in spending. But then something
happened that was beyond the board's control: The county executive
approved the entire budget except for employee raises.

"It was up to the board to decide whether to fund all the new
programs or to give the teachers their raises," says Caitlin's
predecessor, Ashley Nathanson, now a freshman at Harvard University,
who recalls arriving at school that year to find teachers picketing.
She also faced a backlash from fellow students when teachers decided to
"work to rule," meaning they wouldn't stay after school so students
could participate in activities. In the end, the board decided to fund
incremental raises but not the cost-of-living adjustment, which would
have cost $11 million. "Caitlin's still dealing with that because
teachers are still kind of angry about what happened last year,"
Nathanson says.

While it's tough, Caitlin says, her school board experience has
already taught her that it's important to set priorities when resources
are limited. "I think teachers should make six-figure salaries," she
says. "But you're looking at the funds that just aren't there, and, you
know, what goes? You can't make it so the textbooks go. Students need
textbooks, and students need desks. So you have to say, 'Teachers,
you're not going to get that 3 percent cost-of-living increase that we
promised you.'"

Caitlin's teachers are careful not to lobby her during school, "but
sometimes I have confrontations with teachers where I'm the board
member, and that's hard," she says. After a long day of meetings and
activities at a student council retreat this fall, she had to leave to
compete in a field hockey game. Her team lost, and she came back
exhausted and emotional. Late that evening, Kate Snyder, Old Mill's
student council adviser, drew her into a debate over the school's lunch
schedule, which allows students only25 minutes to eat—not enough
time, Snyder and others argued.

Caitlin normally leaves school before lunch, but she ate at school
one day to assess the situation. Students might have seemed a little
rushed, she says, but the situation didn't exactly shock her. "Maybe
that's cold-hearted," she says, "but I'm focusing on accelerated
academic achievement. You're not at school to eat, you're at school to
learn." The clash of opinions still upset her, especially since she
feels indebted to Snyder, who first encouraged her to run for the
school board position.

In spite of the moments of awkwardness that come with serving on the
school board, she says that learning about the inequities in public
education has made her keen to fix them. "A lot of times people ask me,
'Why be the student member?'" she says. Caitlin's answer? "Because I
can. It's such a unique opportunity because I can give back to my
school system. Because sometimes people will think, 'Oh, I don't like
how this is going.' Well, get involved. Do something about it. Don't
just sit on your butt and say you don't like it."

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